My fiancée's sister turned 16 the other day and as I watched her and her incredibly sophisticated and self-confident friends celebrating, I tried to recall my 16th year. I must have spent the entire 12 months hiding under the bed with my eyes closed against the world for I could remember very little of that time.

I remember turning 17 because it meant I could get my driver's license. It took two attempts because while I could drive, the necessary skills left me whenever a testing officer got into the passenger's seat. Clutching the steering wheel, I would leapfrog the car down the road, the testing officer bracing himself against the dashboard with one hand while he tried to scrawl "failed" on his clipboard with the other.

I was in Grade 11 when I turned 16 and rode to school most mornings on the back of a neighbour's truck. He worked for a plumbing supply company, which meant that often my only companions on the truck's tray were white porcelain toilets. Whenever we pulled up beside a bus, sixty or more commuters, including several of my fellow students, would stare down at the pimply-faced kid in the school uniform sitting in the back of the open truck surrounded by white toilet bowls.

Oasis and Matchbox 20 were in the ascendency and longish hair was a desirable commodity. I would have sold my twin sister - sorry, Kelly - for longish hair, but I suspect that my father regularly whispered in the ear of the local barber and so I routinely suffered a "short back and sides".

As a result, my head looked very much like a toilet brush, if you can imagine a toilet brush with pimples, a look that at least helped me blend in with my surrounds when riding to school on the back of the truck. My mother, bless her, has kept numerous photographs taken of me in those days and the toilet brush analogy is a remarkably accurate one.

I was clumsy, socially inept and all but incoherent on those occasions when I found myself in the company of females my own age. I had no idea what I wanted to be and the only ambition I had was to get as far away from school as possible, as soon as possible. There was, I knew, a world out there but the only glimpses of it I had seen were of Currumbin, Coolangatta and Greenmount during the annual family holiday.

We travelled in my grandparents' car to relatives at Coopers Plains most Sunday afternoons, where my parents played cards, and once or twice, I recall, we caught the train to visit friends at Nundah. The rest of the world remained a huge blank page.

And so I watched as my future sister-in-law and her friends laughed and chattered, sitting in their beautifully styled clothes and tossing back their perfectly styled hair as they flipped open their mobile phones to field the constant stream of incoming calls. They seemed so grown up and yet their lives had not yet begun. It all lies before them, the joys and the sadness, the achievements and the disappointments, the love and the rejection.